Storing the Wind
I’m smiling today after reading about some new Midwest advancements in wind energy. Saving wind energy for calm days is the theme. Small utilities in the midwest think they’ve hit on a way to efficiently store wind power.
Wind power is coming into public view as the elegant icon of energy security, we are in such need of something like this to curb our dependency on foreign oil. The demand for wind power is booming because wind is a source of energy that is both clean and cost effective.
Now a group of utilities in Iowa, Minnesota and the Dakotas has a plan to make it reliable.
Using existing technology, backers plan to spend $200 million for a “wind storage†project that would be under construction in 2009 and in service in 2011.
“It really gives wind energy a much greater value. It’s essentially a ‘battery’ for wind energy,†said Bob Haug, executive director of the Iowa Association of Municipal Utilities.
While Xcel Energy and the federal government also are experimenting with ways to “store†wind power in the form of hydrogen, the Iowa Stored Energy Park would employ a far simpler strategy. Wind parks in Iowa, Minnesota and the Dakotas would ship energy over the power grid to a rural site outside Des Moines, about 230 miles south of the Twin Cities.
Three thousand feet below the surface outside Des Moines, a sandstone aquifer (caverns that now hold water) will be injected with pressurized air, with the air temporarily displacing some of the water. The electricity from wind turbines will power the compressors. A pipe will deliver underground air compressed to 900 to 1,000 pounds per square inch. The compression of millions of cubic feet of air will be scheduled for nights and weekends, when wind power often sells for next to nothing.
Wind parks pay for themselves when demand and electricity rates are higher – during weekdays and on hot summer days. But when electricity is most needed, sometimes the wind isn’t blowing.
The stored energy park would get around that problem by slowly releasing the pressurized air from the aquifer to provide most of the energy needed to turn the blades of a generator otherwise powered by natural gas. Metered valves would control the release of the pressurized air.
Mike Meyers
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